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second-in-charge, a right-hand man, which was what he wanted. He didn’t want a partner . He didn’t need an equal . What Rattler wanted was someone who would do what he said without much fuss, someone who understood a basic concept and was clear on a result and would do what it took to get from one to the other without wanting to run the show.
    And someone who was Banished. It might as well be another Banished. Not because Rattler needed anyone else’s visions, especially given that there wasn’t another man in the county who could predict which way the wind would blow to save his life, and hadn’t been in an easy couple of generations, not since most everyone had gone and married outside and diluted the line. No. He wanted a Banished man because it felt right to him in the same way it felt right that he’d put on his grandpa’s silver watch that didn’t keep time and nodded as he left the house at the old family portrait of his great-grandparents that hung in his hall—because this was about getting back to the past, to the way it was meant to be, to the way it was ordained before the Families left the soil of that village in Ireland so many years ago.
    Derek Pollitt wasn’t the worst of them and he wasn’t the best. He had a taste for weed and a pint-a-day rum habit, but that made him about ten times as reliable as the ones who’d gone down the prescription-drug road. Those ones twitched; those ones were about as skittish as a burnt cat. They forgot whether they were coming or going, and Rattler didn’t need any of that.
    Ironic, really, since he was doing this for them . For all the lame-ass diluted-blood breed of the Families, those who’d tossed away their heritage the first time they’d caught sight of a tight-fitting skirt, chasing tail all over the county and fathering any number of spawn with the gift so weak in their blood they’d be hard-pressed to know it was there. It didn’t make any sense, since the Banished were drawn to eachother—like bees to honey, the way a girl from the Families could set a man’s heart to pounding—but a lot of men just went for the path of least resistance. The easy score. Then they got locked in, put a ring on a woman’s finger and compounded their error by having more kids to taint the population with half-breeds. Hell, quarter-breeds, eighth-breeds, who knew? In fact, as far as Rattler was aware, there were only a few pure lines left—among them the Sikes and the Tarbells.
    And it was Prairie Tarbell he aimed to bring back. He’d already fathered the girl Hailey with Prairie’s sister, and no one could say it was his fault that Clover had hanged herself from a rafter before her baby took her first steps. Hell, he’d treated Clover Tarbell good —better than he had to, anyway. Rattler’s mouth tightened in a stoic line as he thought about the other ones, the ones who’d resisted, the ones he’d had to raise a hand to.
    Not in anger. He wasn’t an angry man. An idealist, that was what he was—a visionary. Hell, they all ought to be thanking him. He was fine-looking; that was a fact. He’d fathered half a dozen fine-looking kids around town that he knew of, not counting the Tarbell girl, and every one of them had the strength of his blood in their veins, and since he only picked women with the strongest blood ties to their Banished ancestors, he was single-handedly turning around the ruination of the bloodline that Gypsum’s once-proud citizens had allowed to happen.
    Clover’s girl was pureblood. He had done that. And whenhe brought Prairie back, she’d give him children too. Hell, she wasn’t much more than thirty; she had a decade of bearing left, easy—enough time to produce a damn brood.
    It didn’t even bother Rattler that they’d all be girls. He wasn’t the kind of man who had to have a son, who wanted to teach a boy to toss a ball or skin a deer. Rattler wasn’t father material and he didn’t care. He was on this earth for one reason,